KISD leaders say they're frustrated Lincoln School for special education students on low-performing list

Since the 1960s, Lincoln School has served students with severe special needs from across Kent County.

Students don’t graduate from the program, but can attend until they are 26 and can learn some basic life skills, like feeding themselves.

So why did the state Education Department place the school on a list of about 100 traditional programs from across the state that are considered in the lowest performing 5 percent?

Education Department staff members said it has something to do with federal rules and perhaps some confusion on who Lincoln School actually serves.

But local leaders said they’re a bit frustrated. Being on the list gives the school a black eye, and Kent Intermediate School District leaders said they’ve been trying to resolve the problem for months without success.

“If that's the case, then we'd likely remove it from the list,” Forward said.

KISD Assistant Superintendent Ron Koehler said the state’s confusion stems from the way grades are distributed.

Students in other KISD programs, such as Career/Technical Center, also come from county districts. They receive traditional grades, and those grades are sent back to the students’ home districts, where they spend most of the day.

But Lincoln students don’t get traditional grades and they don’t take traditional classes. Some of them take — and fail — MEAP tests, but that’s only because federal rules require 95 percent of a district’s students to be tested, and more than 5 percent of Grand Rapids students are in special education programs.

So the grades are kept in Grand Rapids, and the state counted them all as Grand Rapids students.

What does Lincoln School get for being on the list, other than bad publicity? In theory, the school is eligible for $2 million in grant money to follow one of four improvement plans.

One is a “turnaround” plan, where the principal half the staff would be replaced. That’s unlikely for Lincoln, since the building has some of the most specialized teachers in the county.

A “restart” model would close the school and have it reopen under the management of a charter school operator, and special education at this level is not often seen among the charters.

Closing the school is an option, and the last is a “transformational” model where teachers and staff receive extra training after the principal is replaced.

Koehler said there likely will be a new, fifth option, which is to do nothing and wait for the state to correct its mistake.

A bigger question is why didn't the state Education Department know more about the school -- one of the first of its kind in the state -- before issuing the list.